Clear and Present Danger
by BerylCoronet
Summary: Sherlock was tortured, shot by his best friend's wife and killed a man. With the spectre of Moriarty's return hanging over his head, he nears his breaking point. That is when Sally Donovan comes to him with an old unsolved murder case, unaware that it will awaken a ghost from Mary's past. To make matters worse, London is again under the threat of a huge terrorist attack.
1. Chapter 1

**Clear and Present Danger**

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."  
― Leo Tolstoy, _War and Peace _

# # #

_London, Eleven Years Ago_

The key clicked in the lock. She froze in place, calculating rapidly. The target was on the floor, face down as expected, gasping for breath. He wasn't dead yet, but it would not be long now. She couldn't have shot him in the head or the heart, because it would have looked too much like an execution rather than a robbery gone bad and that would have raised the kind of questions her client didn't want asked.

"Thom, honey, I guess you were right about me not going to work today," called a feminine voice from the entrance hallway.

The wife. She would be in the living-room in a few seconds, not nearly enough time for her to make her escape. Shoes clacked against the polished floor of the corridor. It was a deviation from the plan. The wife was not supposed to be home for another three hours, but sometimes the unpredictable happened. She had only one way out. The wife came into view: average height, heavily pregnant, brunette, long hair, dark golden skin, voluminous cheekbones, slanted dark eyes. She pulled the trigger, before the other woman had a chance of fully realize what she had walked in on. Her mouth fell open, panic flooding her features, as her eyes widened, gaze glued to her husband bleeding to death on the carpet. She looked down at herself. The pain of the shot had to be registering by now. She wavered on her feet, mouth open, though no sound rolled off her lips, before she finally toppled to the floor. It was not an immediately fatal shot, as too much precision would have only made matters worse, but it was one that would kill her.

# # #

_London, Present Day_

Every year, Sally told herself it was the last time and yet she came back the next. She was the only person to still do that. Weeds were overrunning the abandoned grave. The left upper corner of the stone was cracked. There was nobody left to care for it. Thomas Campbell's father had died of a stroke five years ago and his mother had gone to live with her step-daughter in New Zealand. His wife, the only survivor of the attack that had claimed his life and that of his unborn son, had disappeared, most likely overcome by the grief and trauma. Only Sally failed to move on. Each year she visited his burial sight and brought flowers. Each year she opened the file of the unsolved case and closed it concluding there was nothing else that she could have done.

It had been her first crime scene and it had stuck with her, following her around her entire career and featuring in the occasional nightmare. It wasn't the brutality and the blood that had gotten to her, but the senselessness of it all. Thomas Campbell could as well have been her, one of her siblings or her friends. A 30-years old accountant from a blue collar background gunned down together with his seven-months pregnant wife in their new flat in Battersea. The break-in had been rather amateurish. The burglar had obviously not expected anyone to be home, taken the weapon along as a precaution or maybe out of sheer stupidity and when Campbell had turned out to be around after all, most likely panicked and shot him. If he had fallen on his back rather than on his front, he could have been saved. To compound the tragedy, his wife, a recent Russian emigrant, had felt ill that day and had returned home earlier than normal, catching the thief in the act. By the time a neighbor had called 999, it had been too late for the baby, but she had fought to live and after ten weeks in a medically-induced coma, she had woken up. In the aftermath of the trauma she had suffered, she had been unable to recall anything and had later left the country, presumably to go back to her motherland.

Her eyes, dark and slightly slanted, haunted her with their empty, lost look. She had never cried, just stared, her hands with long, slim fingers folded over her stomach, now devoid of her dead son. Those eyes and the blood creeping on the floor stayed with her. They had never caught the killer or perhaps they did. This kind of perpetrator always re-offended. He or she was in prison for another crime. She had to believe that. But she still dreamed of blood marring a pristine floor and a beige carpet and of the lifeless eyes of a woman who lived but wished she did not. And whenever she thought of that woman, Sally felt like she had let her down. She had failed to speak for her dead.

# # #

_Moscow, December 25th 2013_

The metallic trill of a familiar ring-tone cut through the night, waking her up instantly. Adrenaline spiked. She was immediately alert yet perfectly calm. She grabbed the mobile from her night-stand without opening her eyes. Pressing it to her right ear, she sat up on the bed.

"Operation Hidden Treasure," said her direct superior. "You need to come in."

"I'm on my way."

# # #

"Charles Augustus Magnussen is dead," her superior told her by way of greeting the moment she stepped into his office. "He was shot by Mycroft Holmes' baby brother."

"My analysis factored that possibility," she said, sinking into the chair across the desk from him.

He got to his feet and moved to the samovar on the tiny table by the far wall in order to fill a tea glass. "In front of his brother, his only known friend and over a dozen witnesses." He handed her the glass.

"I'll admit that my prognosis did not anticipate one of the world's best detectives, if not the best, committing one of the world's sloppiest crimes." She breathed in the thick, cloying aroma of the tea and took a sip, the taste of smoke and tar spreading onto her buds. "Do we believe Mycroft Holmes knows we slipped Magnussen that file?"

"If I were him, I'd suspect it. So yes, it's safe to say he knows."

"Which means his brother's decision to spend the rest of his life in prison has just made our operation a personal attack," she concluded, cradling the tea glass by its ornate silver holder in her hands. "We need to keep an eye on him."

"We already are."

"Through an asset whom we know to be a triple agent." She paused, as her mind slammed into over-drive. "Sir, may I see our copy of the file on the attempt on Sherlock Holmes' life?"

He gestured towards her laptop on the desk. She turned the computer towards her and pulled up the necessary file, giving the medical report a cursory glance. "She shot him."

Blue eyes watched her quizzically.

"Single gun shot to the liver, through the inferior vena cava. If he had fallen face-down or if the bullet had gone all the way through, blood loss would have killed him. If he had fallen on his back, it would have been the ensuing heart arrest or the shock. Either way, it looks sloppy, anything but what it truly is: a professional hit. This is how she killed my husband."

He leaned back in his chair. "She didn't shoot you in the liver."

"No, she shot me in the lung. A tension pneumathorax is rather difficult to survive," she recounted dryly, speaking as though of someone else. Distancing herself from the event and from her now defunct existence as a wife and prospective mother was what kept the person she had become sane and functional. Anger and grief would cost her that. She needed to stay anchored in acceptance. She was not a victim; she was a professional and she needed to stay focused on the job.

"Our English section assures me it was Magnussen."

"They're wrong," she said firmly. "It was her."

"Why?"

"For the same reason I recommended we gave Magnussen everything we have on her. She leads to John Watson, he leads to Sherlock Holmes and he to the British government personified and Magnussen would not have been able to help himself, as dangerous as it was. He would have tried to blackmail Mycroft Holmes and Holmes would have ridden himself of him. Problem solved and we wouldn't have had to lift a finger. All because of one universal truth: a leopard can never change its spots. Magnussen was a blackmailer and A.G.R.A is an assassin. She shot him to keep her secret, a secret we still possess and can still use to our advantage."

He nodded. "Alright, but I want you on point."

"Sir, if I may... ."

"Alima Aldarovna," he snapped, prompting her to sit up straighter in her chair. "We would not be having this conversation, if I had so much as an inkling of a suspicion that your judgment is impaired. There is only one way to rattle an assassin and that's failure. I should know: I trained a few. Now what's your recommendation exactly?"

# # #

_London, Two Weeks after Christmas_

Mary realized there was someone in the flat. "John," she called out, though she knew he was supposed to be still at the clinic, but it was best not to raise suspicions.

Her safest bet was to get to the kitchen and to the knives. She had gotten rid of her gun, after what happened in Magnussen's office and the advanced pregnancy slowed her moves and encumbered the reflexes, but the adrenaline could compensate at least partially. Every one of her instincts was on high alert. It lasted until she lay eyes on her, profiled against the window, halloed in the sickly white light of the January afternoon. Her hair was shorter and there were lines around her eyes, but Mary never forgot a face. She never forgot a target. The name of the target had been Thomas Campbell, an intrepid young City accountant, who had accidentally discovered that his bosses were laundering money for several drug cartels and was too honest to be bought. So they hired her to take care of the problem, only that his pregnant wife had come home early. Unexpectedly. And Mary, not Mary, the woman she had been had eliminated the variable and left the country the same day, because even if the witness survived, it did not matter: the shock would have taken care of the memory, even if she had not had her face covered. Apparently, she had miscalculated. The bottom of her stomach dropped. Mary placed her hands protectively over her stomach. Her daughter was innocent. Her daughter had killed noone.

"Relax. I am not here to kill you," the woman by the window said in a cool, collected voice. Her eyes were two chips of black ice.

"Then why are you here?"

"To schedule an appointment. Every Saturday morning you and your husband go the farmer's market two Tube stations from here. From now on, every second Saturday of the month you will go alone and stop by the French-style bakery across the street to meet with a colleague of mine. He's tall, brown-haired, about your age and next Saturday morning he will be wearing a dark blue overcoat. You will want to buy him a pain au chocolat and black coffee without cream or sugar to celebrate your acquaintance."

Mary scowled. The surprise had receded, but now the walls were closing in on her. "Who do you work for?" she asked, though she was beginning to have an inkling.

"We don't want anything extraneous," the other woman continued as though Mary had not spoken. "Nothing that could put you at risk. Just things you notice about Mycroft Holmes... and his brother, when we care to ask."

"And if I refuse?"

"Bogota, hit and run. Frankfurt-am-Main, accidental drowning. Shanghai, heart-attack. Charleston, suicide. Nairobi, another suicide. If you're not in Paul Bakery this Saturday at 9 AM, phones will ring in each and every one of these locations. If you tell anyone about this conversation, the phones will ring. If you lie or try to double-cross us in any way, we will know and the phones will ring."

Mary's heart leaped into her throat, though she schooled her features into a blank expression. She didn't have too many options. All she could do was try and rattle the woman across the room from her. "What about London, burglary gone wrong eleven years ago?"

Not so much as a muscle moved on that narrow, pinched face. "That wasn't personal. It was just a job. And so is this."

The kitchen door was in the periphery of Mary's vision. Maybe if she made a dash for it and got a knife. But she didn't have the time. The other woman shook her head no.

"I wouldn't, if I were you. You're too valuable of an asset for me to kill you, but if you were to gain the upper hand and kill me instead." She tilted her head slightly to the side, her deceptive serenity morphing into something predatory. "You undoubtedly guessed my affiliation by now and you know what we do to those who touch our own."

"Why?" she rasped for reasons she could not fathom. She had been in the clear. It was supposed to be over.

"Why is this happening to you? No idea. Presumably because life is a bitch. 9 AM Saturday. Don't be late!"

# # #

Sally stared at the pictures sprawled across her work computer screen. She could rebuild the crime scene piece by piece with her eyes closed, if need be. She clicked the imagine programme closed, lying the ghosts of the Campbell family to rest. This was the last year she went to visit Thomas Campbell's grave. The last.

# # #

It was Saturday morning and Mary Watson stood on the side-walk across the street from Paul Bakery and checked her watch: 8:42. What were the odds of an unlucky wife of a target being recruited into the Russian intelligence service after surviving a bullet to her left lung? Not quite impossible, if that woman was a Russian national, a promising psychologist in training who spoke English with a BBC accent, had no immediate family anymore and for whom they could provide an answer to the senseless tragedy that had befallen her out of the clear blue sky. But still low, very, very low. Maybe Alima Campbell was right. Maybe life was indeed a bitch. But none of that mattered now.

All that mattered now was that she had two choices: go in, invite the secret back into her life and add another betrayal to her ledger, one that would break her and John, because even the forgiveness of a good man had a limit. Or turn around and tell Mycroft Holmes, who had to be suspecting her of shooting his brother, that she was a vulnerability and hand him the excuse to crush her on a platter.

She checked her watch again. 8:59. In or out? That was the question.

"It's never over," she murmured and took a step forward.

~ the end ~


	2. Chapter 2

_London, Present Day_

There was a rare spring in Andrea's step, as she strolled into his office. Mycroft lifted his gaze from the screen of his laptop. Her face was pinched and her eyes were darker than usual. Mycroft leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs, and looked at her expectantly.

"Mary Watson is meeting with a Russian intelligence operative stationed in London," she said without further ado and handed him a memory card.

Mycroft took the card from her and stuck it in his laptop. He didn't understand people who required a holiday from work; he desperately wanted one from his family.

"They meet every second Saturday of the month at a French-style bakery nearby a farmer's market the Watson's frequent," Andrea elaborated, as he clicked through the photographs on the card. "It was carefully set-up. They even stationed a new agent in the UK for it. It took the MI-5 a while to identify the pattern."

"Tell the MI-5 to stand down and bring in Mrs. Watson." He paused, giving her a significant look. "Quietly."

# # #

_North Caucasus, A Week Prior to the Arrest of Lord Moran in London_

The village was quiet, perfectly so. No sound of footsteps. No barging of dogs or mewling of cats. No ax splitting through wood. No laughter. No voices. Nothing. Everything was still, as if life in all its forms had suddenly come to a stops. The gravel crunched under the wheels of the military vehicles. The soldiers first noticed a dead dog on the steps on one of the houses. Next there was a woman in a yard. Then children by the side of the road. Goats in an open barn. The captain stopped the column and orders his soldiers into the one of the houses. Everyone inside was dead. No visible wounds and no blood or signs of violence anywhere. It was as though the entire villages both people and animals, had just lied down and died.

# # #

_London, Present Day_

Sally straightened the collar of her trench-coat and clambered up the stairs to the brownstone at number 221B on Baker Street. She paused right before ringing the door bell, feeling foolish. She reminded herself that this was a bad idea and yet she did not walk away. She was big enough of a person to admit that she had been at least partially wrong about him, but her instincts warned her that she had gotten something right as well. A most bizarre incident less than a week ago featuring a dramatic resurfacing of James Moriarty seemed to confirm her suspicions. The day after the transmission a group of men and women in suits showed up at the Yard with a stack of documents that were so freshly printed, the ink had yet to dry on them, and seized everything they had on the criminal mastermind. The rumor mill whispered that had been the MI-5. Either way, the Met no longer handled the case. But that was only the tip of the iceberg of weird rattling British law-enforcement these days and as usual, it all converged towards Sherlock Holmes. The man was just a magnet for the bizarre side of the law.

Swallowing her misgivings, she pressed her index finger on the door bell button. The door parted to reveal Holmes' land-lady, a flour-stained apron covering her flower pattern dress. Her pleasant expression melted into an annoyed one, when she lay eyes on the Detective-Sergeant. Sally supposed she could not blame her. The last time she had seen the older woman had been when she had come with a heavy police escort to arrest her tenant.

"Yes?" Mrs. Hudson muttered frostily.

Sally smiled agreeably. "Hello. I'm here to see Sherlock Holmes. Is he home?"

Mrs. Hudson looked her over skeptically but admitted her in. "He's upstairs."

Sally climbed up, still mulling over how best to approach this. The breach of rules and ethics chafed, as did giving him this kind of advantage over her. She didn't even know what she hoped to accomplish by doing this. The case had languished in their archives for eleven years, forgotten and left unsolved. There was nobody around for her to bring closure to by telling them they finally had the culprit, who by the way could be dead for all she knew. But she had no other idea as to how to liberate herself from this particular ghost.

It took him a full minute to open the door of the flat upstairs. Sally was taken aback by the sight of him. He had always been pale, but now he looked positively ashen. The skin around his eyes was bruised. He was guarded, as he studied her with a tired gaze, its sharpness dulled to a blunt edge.

"What are you doing here, Sergeant Donovan?" he asked in a low voice that was even more guttural than usual.

"I need your help," she replied, brandishing the file she was holding.

He let her in. The living-room was clouded in semi-obscurity, drapes pulled over the windows. He switched the light on rather than lifting them. Dust danced in the air, which smelled stale. Papers, open books, laptops and computer parts were spread all over the floor and the furniture. He pushed off a few newspapers from a black leather armchair. Sally sank into it warily and held up the file to him. He towered over her, a hard to decipher expression plastered onto her face, but did not reach to take it from her.

"I know it might not be weird enough for you, but I thought my copying a confidential Met file could prove enough of an incentive for you to take a look," she cajoled. He was not budging. "Please... Sherlock," she insisted.

He did not ask her why this was so important to her, merely wretched the file from her grasp and rifled through it, a crease between his eyebrows. "I'll let you know, as soon as I solve it... Sally," he drawled, a sense of finality to his words.

Sally rose uneasily, casting one last helpless gaze around her. "Are you all right?" she inquired, unable to stop herself.

He didn't respond, but instead padded to the kitchen, taking her file with him. Left with nothing else to do, she watched his retreating back, until he disappeared from view. Only then she walked to the exit with a heavy heart.

# # #

Sherlock waited until the door closed in Sally Donovan's wake. Then he dropped the file she had brought in on the kitchen table right between his microscope and plate of dried-up sandwiches and moldy vegetables. The autopsy report on Thomas Campbell was staring him in the face. Cause of death: exsanguination caused by a bullet wound to the inferior vena cava. The bullet had been recovered. The ammo was .32 ACP. The gun had never been found, but the DI on the case had speculated that it could be a Walther PP/K. Sharp pain stabbed in quick bursts at his right side. He sucked in a deep breath, self-consciously pressing the palm of a hand above his liver. His stomach roiled. He knew who killed Thomas Campbell, his unborn son and put his wife in a coma. He knew. He had known since the first glance: the break-in had been competently staged – thorough enough that it had not looked like the work of a first-time offender, yet careless enough to be perpetrated by someone who would mistakenly try to rob an occupied flat.

_Oh, Sherlock, if you take one more step I swear I will kill you._

Mary's voice reverberated in his ears, the echo faded and distorted. The ache in the left part of his torso peaked briefly then vanished. He had not felt the pain of the bullet entering his body at first. Neither had Thomas Campbell. Neither had his wife.

_I am sorry, Sherlock. Truly am. _

He could never tell Sally. The words of the autopsy report blurred before his eyes. He could never tell anyone and it will never stop hurting. He fumbled in the pockets of his robe for his mobile and dialed Mary. No response was forthcoming.

# # #

Alima Aldarovna sprinted into her superior's office. "You wanted to see me?"

He gestured to the tablet resting atop a thick manila envelope on his desk. "I am promoting you and raising your clearance. You'll sign everything and stamp your thumb wherever needed later. Now read."

She sat down, picked up the tabled and read. "Operation Silver Blaze?" she asked.

"What do you think?"

"MI-5 should not be a problem. Their high-ups are rigid Cold War dinosaurs with predictable moves, but pulling this under Mycroft Holmes' nose is playing with fire," she cautioned.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. "Mycroft Holmes is every intelligence agency's worst nightmare. He doesn't hesitate, slip up or make a mistake – it shouldn't be humanly possible, but it is. He doesn't drink, doesn't have any addictions and he sleeps alone. He doesn't hold grudges, either. His family is wealthy, yet none of them have any interest in that wealth, content to let it languish in properties and bank accounts. He used to have a mild passion for sweets, but he's even given that up. So he can't be bought, blackmailed or tempted with revenge. He can't be pressured or otherwise constrained. In short, he's untouchable... with one invaluable exception. His brother, Sherlock Holmes, is the whole package. He studied Chemistry at three universities and blew up a lab at every one of them. He could have won a Nobel prize by now, but instead he's a barely paid and infamous private detective with three addictions and a penchant for breaking and entering. And he recently killed a man in full view of over a dozen witnesses. With his best friend's gun."

"He's our ticket in," she concluded.

"The fact that he's the worst kind of relative a leader of an intelligence community can have doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

"I know. Our file on James Moriarty and his network was both within my area of expertise and in accordance with my old clearance."

"Under the current political circumstances, we cannot come clean to the British about this. They'll think we're springing them a trap and they won't be entirely wrong. After all, that thought did cross our minds. But we can't leave this to chance, either. So I want you in London. I want you to have lead on this."

"Over the objections of the English section?"

He smiled benevolently, flashing teeth. "Yes, yes, I know all that talk about how you're not a field agent per se and how, aside from the occasional analysis, you're an expert on counter-terrorism, not this type of operations on foreign soil. But none of that matters now, because what Silver Blaze needs is your ability to get into troubled heads and screw them to our liking. If there is one-hang to your going to London, to anyone going to London is Mycroft Holmes' own ability to get into anyone's head, but thanks to you, to your proposal for Operation Hidden Treasure, we have a way to keep the Holmes brothers off-balance. Use that Trojan horse wisely, but above all, do not let Mycroft Holmes into your head, because once you do, he'll be in there forever."

# # #

"John, is that you?" Mary asked, though she knew better. She turned the lock, blocking the door shut.

Apparently, she was to take to periodically hosting tea parties for intelligence agents. The woman who stood across the corridor from her was unfamiliar: tall, slim, long dark brown hair and impassive dark eyes. "Mrs. Watson," the stranger said with a pleasant and false smile. "I'm afraid I am going to have to ask you to come with me now."

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: reviews keep the muse happy! :)

# # #

_London, Present Day_

A cold wind ruffled the thin snow and blew tiny specks of it caked with dirt into people's faces and against the walls and the cracked pavement leading down to the abandoned Holborn tramway station. The daylight faded with each step down the narrowing staircase that descended into the bowels of the dead city beneath the city. The station was nearly intact, a monument of rust, knotted cables and props from films and exhibitions made there. Some of the railways tracks had survived and the signs on the decaying walls were still colourful. Crime scene lights illuminated one of the tunnels going to Aldwych, while forensic markers pointed to a maze of steps imprinted in the dust and dragging marks of tables and large bags. There were also shards of glass everywhere and scattered medical supplies that looked fresh. Amid them all lay the body: contorted on the filthy floor, eyes wide open staring pitiably at the ceiling above.

"Hello, Molly," DI Greg Lestrade greeted the young pathologist bent over the corpse on the floor. "Are we borrowing you tonight?"

Molly lifted her head and smiled candidly. "Greg, hullo, yes, you are. I have no cause of death for you yet, though they are signs of struggle," she said and raised one of the victim's hands, which had bloody knuckles and broken finger-nails. She then pointed to the nose swollen and bent at an unusual angle and the gash on his upper lip. "He's been dead for at least twelve hours. I'll know more, once I've done the post-mortem."

Greg grunted an acknowledgement and turned to Sally, who was coming up to them, sauntering between forensic equipments and constables.

"The body was found by a group of urban explorers, who broke in the station for a photo-shoot and earned themselves a good scare for their troubles," she said disdainfully. "There was no ID or credit cards found, but he's too clean to be homeless. It seems this was a lab of some sorts – drugs maybe... . Oh, hullo, Molly."

The pathologist waved briefly with a gloved hand. "Hi, Sally." She straightened herself up and strolled towards Greg, who ordered more samples of the broken glass be taken, before gesturing that Molly followed him away from the fray and towards the quieter entrance to the tunnel.

"How are you doing, Molly?" he asked, looking the petite doctor over with concern.

Molly shrugged, doing her best to appear casual, but her shoulders were tense. "I am fine. If Moriarty wanted to kill me, he would have done something by now."

Greg wondered if she was trying to convince him or herself. The copper sighed. "You work with us. I can justify sending a constable to watch over you."

She seemed to hesitate, shifting her weight from one leg to another. She finally nodded, nervously licking her lips. "Thanks, Greg."

# # #

Tom surfed the fresh fruit and vegetables isle at Tesco, reminding himself for the umpteenth time why he had decided to live healthily, no matter how little inclined towards that he was.

"Hello, Tom," came a pleasant feminine voice from somewhere at his left.

His gaze drifted past his cart to the one pressed to it, past a bottle of white wine, pitta, a box of butter scones, apples, pesto and spaghetti and all the way to a woman in her thirties with Asian features, cheerful recognition written all over them. He had never seen her in his life, but she was grinning openly to him. "Fancy meeting you here like this!" she said.

She hurried towards him and hugged him enthusiastically. "Smile and say hello," she whispered in his ear. She smelled of frost and a sharp, spicy perfume.

"No," he muttered numbly.

"Yes," she pressed, her black leather covered hands framing his face. "How long has it been? I don't even remember."

His heart stuttered and he fought the irrational impulse to shove her away and make a run for it.

"Look at you, all flustered," she gushed and giggled loudly, as an old lady passed by them.

She leaned in closer again, dropping her voice to a faint murmur. "Your fiancée is working tonight. I want you to pay her a visit for old times' sake. At St. Bart's, you will swipe a blood sample of the cadaver she is supposed to be autopsying. I will provide a replacement and guide you through. There is an ear-piece I placed in your right jacket pocket; use it to communicate with me. You do this and it's over. No more favours, no more surprises and no more living in fear of going to prison for the rest of your life." She pressed a kiss to his cheek and winked. "It was good seeing you again, Tom."

"Yeah... you too," he mumbled.

"Ring me sometime, will you?"

# # #

_Lord Moran's Residence, Devonshire Countryside, Two Years Earlier_

She draped herself over his back, her arms encircling his torso, her silken strands caressing his shoulders, when he would slip off the bed. "Don't go," she enticed, kissing his temple.

Moran sighed. "Eustace... you know I must," he said but leaned into her, turning his head to kiss her fully on the lips.

She smiled into the kiss. "You don't have to do anything, Seb, you're rich, you own a yacht and a castle and you have a five centuries-old title." She kissed her way down the side of his neck. "You can spend your entire life in bed with me."

He drew back and grasped her chin, lifting her head so he could look her in the eye. "You are so beautiful, so very beautiful... and clever. So clever, that for a while I actually thought you were who you said you were."

She frowned slightly, her features drawing taught. "I don't understand...," she said and then coughed a bit, gasping for air as she did.

He slid out of her loosening embrace with a smile and pushed onto her right shoulder. She dropped on her back on the bed like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.

"Five or six?" he asked coldly.

Her beauty grew overshadowed, as her face twisted in a pained grimace. She started to pant, lips moving without uttering a word. Her pupils dilated, her eyes glassy with fear.

He wrapped himself in a silk robe. "MI-5 or MI-6?" he insisted. She twitched, as her fingers pulled feebly at the sheets underneath them.

He sat on the edge of the bed. "Five is more likely, given that this is an internal matter... or so it would seem to your superiors, anyway. Don't worry. Nobody is going to trace your whereabouts today to me. You'll simply disappear. Of course, your colleagues would suspect it was my doing, but without any evidence, there is only so much even the British Intelligence can do. I could have asked what you told them about me first, but I know I'm being watched. So a clean break was the best solution." He stretched to pull a box from the lower drawer of the night-stand. He extracted the pieces of a burner phone from it and began to assemble them with quick, expedient moves. "I'm sorry, I wish I could say it was me, but we both know it wasn't."

"Why?" she wheezed.

His thumb tenderly traced her jawline. "Because, my dear, why not?"

He dialled and pressed the phone to his right ear. "Hello, old friend... . Yes, problem solved. Now that we're back to business as usual, I would like to place a new order."

# # #

_London, Present Day_

It hurt. Pain sprang from his collar bone, radiating throughout his entire torso, setting every nerve on the way ablaze. The bone was not broken, though, merely cracked. His arms and legs ached from being stretched close to the point of snapping, immobilized in the same unnatural position for too long. The thick chains dug into his wrists and ankles, the skin chafed raw beneath them and the muscles bruised. He was thirsty and his head pounded, the pressure of long-denied sleep weighing heavily on him. His eyes were dry and felt gritty. All he wanted was to close his eyes and drift away. He yearned for that even more than for relief from pain or release from the literal chains holding him prisoner.

Lights flashed brightly in the night. The sound of approaching helicopters burst from above. The time had run out. He grabbed John's gun, delivered his message and shot. In the upheaval the blast was not even loud. The bullet got Magnussen on the side of his forehead and the man fell backwards, a dribble of blood running down his cheek. It was quick. It was over. Sherlock could almost be disappointed. Somehow he had expected it to last longer. To be more. For him to feel something. Something other than vaguely bereft. Mary was safe. John, the first person ever to accept him, genius and twisted nature and all, his first friend ever, would get his happily ever after. He would go home to his wife, have a child, be a doctor, be happy. All that had cost had been Sherlock's soul.

Pain... the pain was back. It was in his shoulder. No, in his left side. He had been shot. Mary had shot him. There was someone there with him... . He reached blindly and grasped, intend to defend himself.

"Sherlock, Sherlock, love, wake up!"

Mrs. Hudson... . Sherlock woke up with a start. Mrs. Hudson was right in front of him, scowling in confusion and worry. He had his hand on his wrist and he was squeezing her too hard. She had been the one to shake his shoulder. He made himself unclench his fingers and let her go.

"Sherlock!" Mrs. Hudson repeated, outrage mixed with uncertainty in her voice.

He blinked. He couldn't remember when he had fallen asleep. He blinked again, trying to get his bearings. He was in his living-room, at Baker Street, curled on the couch. The lights were ablaze and the windows were dark. How long had he slept?

"Molly's here with Tom, dear," Mrs. Hudson told him.

He looked past her shoulder to see indeed Molly in the doorway with a fretful Tom by her side. Sherlock was dumb-founded: hadn't they broken up? He took in Molly's wide, fearful eyes and remembered... . Moriarty was back in town. Maybe he had done something to her. Sherlock sat up quickly, heart speeding up with his moving. He waved off Mrs. Hudson.

"Go and fetch us tea and biscuits," he said in a deliberately harsh tone. Her obvious concern was tiresome and he didn't like the way she was wringing her hands, as she gawked at him.

# # #

Mary felt as though she was entering a lion's den, when she walked into Mycroft Holmes' office. She knew it was deliberate. The setting was stuffy and innocent enough, but not entirely. There was a sense of something omnious hanging deliberately in the room. The man himself sat behind his desk, wearing a bespoke three-piece, pinstripe suit, and watched her with the most benevolent expression someone that powerful and dangerous could muster. His mask was pitch-perfect: the warmth in his eyes was genuine and the small smile floating on his lips was calm and polite. His posture was vaguely hunched and non-threatening. Yet he received her in the same manner a king would receive a server. He didn't stand up, greet her or offer her anything. Instead, it was the woman who had brought her there who made all the offices of host, taking her coat, pulling up a chair and offering her something to drink, which Mary politely declined. She kept her composure, though every instinct she had warned her that she was in imminent and unavoidable peril.

"Mr. Holmes," she began nonchalantly, as the door closed behind his assistant. "John and I haven't seen you since that day at the airport."

Mycroft's smile widened a fraction, a false note finally entering into it, but he said nothing. He merely turned his open laptop towards her. Photographs of her with her Russian contact filled the screen. She opened her mouth to justify herself, but he shook his head no.

"What did you tell them?" he enunciated coolly.

"Mr. Holmes...," she tried again.

"Mrs. Watson, I am the only person in the world from whom Sherlock Holmes cannot protect you so think well and hard, before you even consider lying to me. Once you come clean, we will discuss what you will impart my Russian colleagues at your next meeting."

Mary swallowed hard. "I'm out," she said vehemently.

"Correction, Mrs. Watson, you were out, but that was before you decided to have coffee with an FSB operative every month."

"I didn't have a choice," she snapped. "They blackmailed me."

"Of course they did. It's their job to or have you forgotten?"

Mary placed her hands atop of her pregnant belly and steepled the together. "I left for a reason," she ground out, glaring at him in such manner that it would make it clear that she would not be pulled back in.

"And that reason is that the CIA gave you the wrong target because of faulty intelligence. Unfortunately, you already executed by the time they told you to abort so they decided to cut their losses and claim you had gone rogue. So you ran and went freelance, but five years ago you changed your mind about that, too. When you acquired work at the same clinic as John Watson, my attention was understandably somewhere else. It was the first and last mistake I will make where you are concerned. Of course, Sherlock was tight-lipped about your secret, but I know you shot him, because you killed a man right here in London in very much the same fashion eleven years ago. Whatever delusions he's harbouring about you, I assure you I don't share them. You attempted to murder him and he survived only by a tremendous amount of luck. Then when your interests were best served by it, you proceeded to spy on me, forgetting that you are a proper British citizen now, which makes you liable to prosecution for espionage, easily provable as you have just seen. Hence, the only question now is: do you want your child to be born in a hospital or in a prison?"

Mary studied him carefully. Throughout his entire tirade, he had not raised his voice, his tone as calm and as dry as though he was discussing the weather during afternoon tea. "I may be liable, but I'm also the wife of your brother's best friend. He was the best-man at our wedding. You wouldn't survive the scandal, especially after what happened with Magnussen."

Mycroft pursed his lips together, his eyes darkening slightly. "Mrs. Watson, threatening me with your brother is a very, very bad idea. In fact, it might be the worst one you had, since it occurred to you to protect your secrets by killing my brother and if you think for one moment that I wouldn't risk the scandal just to see you punished in some form, you are severely mistaken. Now if you're quite finished with your empty menaces, I require an answer."

Mary sucked in a deep breath. "John can never know."

He raised an eye-brow. "That would depend entirely on your good behaviour," she said amiably.

Mary held back a wince. "I'm in then."

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: reviews keep the muse happy! :)

# # #

It was probably not wise for a woman just entering her ninth month of pregnancy to lug a large bag of groceries from Tesco, but Mary was feeling fine. In fact, she had had very few problems with her baby, especially given the fact that she was fast approaching menopause. Her daughter was doing well and so was she. And for a while, for a short while, she had entertained the illusion that she had been safe, that her past was finally in the past. The notion now appeared silly to her. She should have known better, because unlike people who were as ordinary as she now pretended to be, she had had a glimpse behind the curtain. She was all too aware of the dangers lurking in the most unexpected of places, of the delusion of safety and freedom, of the games of secrets and lies true power played, games from which no escape was possible. The only way out was in a coffin. She should know; she had provided it on more than one occasion.

Still she behaved like a good doctor's wife and brought her purchases home, spreading the ingredients necessary to cook dinner on the kitchen table. She was being Mary Watson, nee Morstan, born October 1972, part-time nurse, who loved cats and baked her own bread, and was the dutiful, pregnant spouse of Dr. John Watson, former of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, currently working as GP at a local clinic. And so she was making sourdough after a recipe she had seen on the latest edition of the Great British Bake Off, because it would go well with the chorizo and chickpea stew she was putting together. She was thinking of a nice, healthy yoghurt parfait for dessert. It was all normal, as though she hadn't just come from a meeting with the British government incarnate, a meeting during which she had agreed to become a triple agent.

As she whisked the batter, she contemplated the irony that she was living the same peaceful, mundane existence Thomas Campbell's family had led for a short while, until she had brutally disturbed it eleven years ago. She had surveyed them for a few weeks, as she had sought the perfect moment to strike. They had been so run-of-the-mill, that it had been pathetically easy for her to get a grip on their routine: the unassuming and too honest for his own good accountant married to an immigrant arrived in England with a student's visa. They woke up early on week days and left for their jobs, he at the City firm that had put a contract hit on his head, and she to the clinic, where she worked as an assistant psychologist; they rang each other during lunch breaks, recently married and in love as they were; in the evenings, they cooked together and ate dinner while watching the telly. They drank copious amounts of tea. On Sundays, they frequented an Orthodox church, because Thomas, romantic that he had been, had converted in order to marry his Siberian-born fiancée. Mary and John followed pretty much the same routine, except for the church thing.

Mary didn't believe in God, though she could feign faith for occasions such as her wedding, because if God existed, then so did Hell, that place specially tailored for people like her. So she couldn't accept that the ways in which the death of the Campbell family kept coming back to haunt her as divine retribution, kharma or fate. But even so, the weird irony of her and Thomas Campbell's wife's twin destinies did not escape her. Alima Campbell had gone from her quiet existence to Mary's former world and in turn, she had become much like the other woman. Either way, they would never be free from each other.

She put the bread in the oven, casting a furtive glance to the clock on the wall. John would be home soon so she should better hurry and have the stew ready. A sob sprang free from her burdened chest, as she tossed the chorizzo and the sliced onion and garlic in the pan. Her vision blurred and she wiped furiously at the tears, telling herself it was the onion, though she should know better than lie to herself by now. She swallowed back on the lament bubbling inside of her, burning its way up her throat, though the tears kept falling and she nearly burnt the sausage. But she did not stop working, adding the tomatoes and chickpeas and tasting it to see if it was properly seasoned, and starting on the parfait in between.

When she had become Mary Morstan five years ago, she had been considering retirement for a while. There was an expiration date to her job, as reflexes faded in time and success brought increased risks, since eliminating the competition was taken quite literally in her former line of work. Besides, she could not outrun the CIA forever and she would either eventually slip or merely have an unlucky strike and they would happen upon her. She had no illusions as to how that would end. She knew too much and she was tied directly to something the Agency desperately wanted buried. And her with it. But the CIA wasn't her only problem: her targets as a freelancer had relatives and friends. Some had gone to the police and there was the ever-present spectre of a copper having an exceptionally good day at the office and catching her. In other cases, such as the one in Columbia, the cartels had put a price on her head. Anyway she sliced it, disappearing seemed to be in order. Disappearing to a major city like London bustling with operatives of every significant intelligence service and international career criminals, a place where she had already taken a job that had gone less than brilliantly, would normally not have been advisable. She should have vanished to an isolated island somewhere with as few extradition treaties as possible and a bad relation with the US.

It had been a job that had brought her to London five years. She had taken the name Mary Morstan as a cover and used her extensive medical skills that always came in handy for someone like her to get hired as a nurse at a GP clinic. The client had been a prickly one and the cover had stretched for a few months, during which she had watched families come in with their loved ones to fret over minor issues that modern medicine could easily mend. At first, the steady, slow rhythm of routine had grated, then annoyed, then amused, then charmed and finished by enthralling. There had been a soft sweetness to living without the constant pump of adrenaline and she had begun to wonder how it felt to sleep with both eyes closed, to have friends and put down roots. Before she could think better of it, she had ended up passing the job to somebody who owned her a favour, investing her Caymen Islands account in a flat, paper work that would stand up to the strictest of scrutinies and the finishing touches on a life that was not hers. That should never have been hers, but it was. At least, it had been until the day she had received a phone call. A single phone call. From Charles August Magnussen. And then it had all unravelled.

The stew smelled deliciously and tasted even better. Mary blew her nose on a kitchen towel and washed the tears off her face. Safety, home and normalcy were real, as long as one believed in them. Without that it was all a façade, one that could come down at any given moment. She absently stroked her belly through her blouse. Her daughter was innocent and to some extent, so was John, who still believed. But that hadn't helped Thomas Campbell or his pregnant wife. Sherlock's promise had been sweet, but that didn't change the fact that any safety was an illusion.

# # #

John Watson stared emptily at his untouched pint, reminding himself for the umpteenth time that he should go home, because Mary would be waiting and if he took any longer, she would worry. He should hurry up and go home to his nine-months pregnant wife and his cosy flat and the warm dinner undoubtedly ready for him. He should hurry and get there before the food got cold. He knew he should, yet he didn't move. He would give her an excuse, of course, for his tardiness, something inane and false like traffic, though she never asked why he sometimes arrived home late. Asking would open too many a can of worms and menace the carefully constructed web of happy lies they had been striving to build together since Christmas.

He loved her or at least that was what he kept telling himself: that he loved Mary Morstan, the woman of the past five years, the woman he knew. He reminded himself that her past was in the past, gone now, but they had a future together. They were about to have a baby. That was what was important. The only thing that mattered. Their family. His family. His regular, loving family, with he and Mary waking up every morning, his going to work, because her doctor had recommended she stayed home until she gave birth, and coming home to dinner, making pleasant, prosaic conversation, watching the telly and going to sleep so that the circle could start anew in the morning. Mary smiled at him and cooked and gossip about friends and neighbours. Together they went to doctor's appointments and he made sure he asked how she was every day. Everything was fine, everything was quiet, everything was normal.

Mary and he moved together through the mechanics of a happy marriage and incipient family. They never missed a step. They never argued, not seriously anyway. It should be perfect. It was picture perfect, but beneath that beautiful, colourful picture lay the cruel, stark truth: Mary had lied to him and not about the silly, banal things prospective romantic partners lied to each: secret, disgusting habits, embarrassing relatives, bad break-ups, arrests for drunken scandals or flashing private parts in public for an adolescent dare, real shoe size or others of the sort. No, Mary had lied about everything, about her very name, about the essence of what made her who she was. She had lied about an entire life and what a life that was. No amount of forgiveness and effort on his part could erase the reality that the woman who lay next to him at night, the mother of his unborn child, had killed people, most likely innocent people, for the highest bidder and she exhibited no remorse for it. She had even shot his best friend.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't stop the icy shiver creeping up his pine, whenever he thought of what that meant for their daughter. With what kind of legacy, what kind of genes were they gifting her? He had killed people too. At war, soldiers lived with the perpetual knowledge that the bullets they fired would inevitably kill fellow human beings. And he had killed a man to save Sherlock's life, a life Sherlock had been willing to throw away by committing a murder of his own, in order to safeguard the assassin he had married from rightful prosecution. Who were they all? What were they all? A bunch of stone-cold killers cheerfully murdering left and right to protect each other. Was it all truly his fault? Did he attract or seek out this kind of people? What did that say about him? What did it say about him and his supposed moral compass that he had not only not turned his wife in for the attempt on his friend's life or for the murders in her past, but he had also stayed married to her as though nothing had happened? As though nothing had changed.

At a loss, he shook his head and paid for his beer left untouched, grabbed his coat and walked out of the pub. The answer was too terrifying to contemplate so he chose to feel nothing, to drift on the surface of a life that on paper was ideal, to go about his work and his life next to his expecting wife as though it was all real, to pretend that his trust in Mary had not been irreversibly fractured, to pretend that he knew her. The alternative was unacceptable. In the rare instants when he scraped together a remnant of honesty, he could admit that he had refused to read the information the A.G.R.A. stick, because if he had, he wouldn't have been able to lie to himself about her and he would have had to face what the truth about her made him, what it could make their daughter. Some nights he dreamed about her, imagined her having Mary's eyes and his mother's hair, looking a bit like Harry maybe, and coming home one day covered in blood, dripping off her.

As he sprinted down the stairs to the tube, he made a mental note to visit Sherlock this week. Moriarty had turned up alive and they should get to work on that.

TBC


	5. Chapter 5

"He's still not a psychopath," Molly insisted, a desperate note in her voice, her gaze darting from Sherlock in his armchair to Tom in the client's chair.

Sherlock looked at Tom, really looked at him, and noticed the dark suit, similar to the ones the detective himself favoured, but cheaper. His shoes were, however, expensive, made of fine black leather, but they were well-worn, signalling that they had been a one-time investment and the young man was trying to get as much traction from them as possible. All that suggested a government job. A remark Molly had made once about meeting him through friends rather than work surfaced to the forefront of his mind. Tom was wringing his hands, his finger-nails were not manicured yet cut very short, well-maintained and he had a few fine paper cuts imprinted on his skin. Not many office workers dealt with paper that much these days. Archives. MOD. He looked into Tom's terrified eyes, as realization dawned.

"No, he's not," Sherlock concluded. He squeezed his eyes shut briefly. "But he is selling state secrets to a foreign intelligence agency."

"No," Tom almost shouted, his lower lip trembling, and making Molly wince in sympathy. "I don't know any state secrets. I work on the MOD publication scheme... . And I didn't sell anything... exactly."

Molly buried her face in her hands and ruefully mumbled something that sounded a lot like: _Where do I keep finding them?_

"You index classified documents about to be made public. You could give the Russians a window of opportunity by providing them with the information, before it becomes common knowledge."

Tom's mouth fell open. "How do you it was the Russians?"

Molly sighed audibly.

"Balance of probability," Sherlock retorted, rolling his eyes. He pressed his palms together, the tips of his fingers pushing against his chin. He studied Tom with a gaze designed to be intimidating. "Gambling debts?" he chanced. Tom did not reply merely continued gaping. Sherlock expelled a long breath. "Recruiters are always looking for a weakness, for someone to be bought. So was it gambling debts?"

"I... I made a mistake," Tom stammered. "It was... stupid... supposed to be just the one time. They paid it for me... . I went to a support group later... I got better." He shot Molly a pleading look. "I swear I hadn't set foot in a casino in over a year, when we met. I wasn't even being contacted by them. I guess the information I passed to them wasn't very useful."

Molly said nothing, only sighed again, tapping an errand strand of hair behind her left ear. She got to her feet, her moves uncertain and restless, and padded to the window, staring through it at the street outside.

"Molly said you could help," Tom went on in a low voice.

"What did they want now?" Sherlock asked resignedly.

"Something strange... something about Molly," Tom replied fearfully, his eyes fixed on the woman by the window. Whatever else he might be, Sherlock didn't doubt that the man before him did love Molly. "I met this woman I've never seen before at Tesco. She wanted me to switch a blood sample from a corpse Molly... was cutting up. She gave me this." He reached in his pocket, pulled out a tiny, skin-coloured earpiece bug and handed it to Sherlock, who weighted it in his palm, as he mulled over the situation. "But I didn't want to do it, I didn't want anything to happen to Molly so I told her."

Sherlock closed his hand around the ear-bud. "What was the caused of death?" he asked, aiming the question at Molly.

Molly didn't turn to face him. "I don't know. Cardiac arrest," she said dully. "But then hearts do stop when we die. The body was found in an abandoned tunnel at the old Holborn station. He was in a fight. He had fresh ecchymoses all over his body and broken finger-nails, but nothing that would have required even hospitalization, let alone kill him. The blood-tests will take a while longer, as you know, but since Tom did not switch the samples, the results should tell us what it was."

Sherlock blinked and pressed his palms together so hard, the muscles in his upper arms tensed with the effort. He couldn't think. His reasoning was failing himand his mind palace was blurry. His deductive abilities had been wavering ever since his return from the fake dead. He had missed something vital about Mary and now as it turned out, he had let another friend down by stupidly resolving not to attempt to read Tom, thinking that doing so would be honouring Molly's wishes. He had put Molly at risk. If the truth about her former fiancé were to surface, she would be tainted by association, questioned, smeared by the press, her professional reputation would be affected, her clearance to perform high-risk autopsies would be revoked. And this... whatever this was... the body found in yet another abandoned subterranean station had to be connected to the use of the tube system and its secrets by Lord Moran in his failed attempt to bomb the Parliament. It was all linked somehow, but he couldn't see how. There were so many things that escaped him. Something was very wrong and he had noted nothing until now. London was in danger, but he couldn't help this time, because it wasn't his body that was betraying him. It was his most prized possession: his intellect. The divorce from feeling was no longer functional. It was all jumbled up and his perceptions were fatally blurred.

_Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side. _

His own words reverberated in his ears. It was his turn on the losing side. He was losing himself. Then an alarm sounded in his head, piercing the fog overwhelming it. Danger... . Molly was in danger. And so was everybody at that crime scene. They had all been exposed to something, to whatever it was that lived in that blood sample the Russian secret service was trying to recuperate. Panic flooding him, turning the sound in his ears to a loud roar. Adrenaline surged and he jumped to his feet.

"No."

One word, uttering in a calm antithetic to the storm raging inside of him. Crisp and low, yet fully capable of shattering the oppressive silence having descended upon his flat. A whiff of a spicy, pungent perfume fleeted to Sherlock's sensitive nostrils and he inhaled deeply. Davidoff Echo Woman. Urban, common enough not to attract attention, average range pricing. A fragrance to wear when wishing to blend in a city like London. All information supplied by a part of his brain acting on a remnant of analytic routine. Sherlock could feel his hands shake and he balled them into fists, as he turned his head towards the entrance. He heard Tom make a choked noise much like whimper, but it seemed to come as though from afar.

There, leaning casually on the door-frame, stood Thomas Campbell's wife, the woman Mary had shot eleven years ago and who had survived against all odds... just like he had. The file Sally Donovan had brought him only had one photo of her from her from her visa application. She was much younger in that one, but Sherlock recognized her immediately. A living spectre from Mary's past running circles around them all. It would never be over. It didn't matter that Sherlock had killed Magnussen. Too many people knew the truth. The immediate threat had been neutralized, but the less pervasive and more diffuse one would always loom the horizon. John's family would never be entirely safe.

"She hasn't been exposed," the stranger said, no inflection in her voice.

Her standard BBC accent was a little too polished to cover her foreign origin entirely, but there was no Russian influence in her manner of speaking, either. Though Sherlock doubted she was ethnically Russian; he looked to be Mongolian, which meant that she most likely belonged to a Siberian population group. Going by her name, she was probably Buryat. In a place as diverse as London, her visage would not stand out and she had furthered her cover by her having dressed like a City girl: a charcoal, short wool coat over an Oxford blue pant suits with black accessories. Nothing conspicuous.

"You already made the exchange," he said almost as an afterthought. He looked at Molly. "The blood test will turn out nothing."

Molly was staring, eyes huge, her expression somewhere between horror and anger. Heels clacked against the floor, as the new-comer approached him. "I gave it a 50-50 chance that he would tell Doctor Hooper the truth and I knew she would come to you rather than go to the authorities and get her former fiancé arrested, which gave me a window of opportunity to sneak into Barts and make the switch myself." She held out a gloved hand. "I believe you have something that belongs to me, Mr. Holmes."

Sherlock frowned. "First Tom," she said firmly.

A hint of a cold, formal smile flourished on her thin, pale lips. "We're not in the habit of advertising the names of the people we recruit and as for further contact, I think you've guessed that one already."

Sherlock dropped the earbud into her awaiting palm.

"Thank you," she said in a deceptively benign voice and closed her fingers around the device.

Sherlock's gaze drifted past her to Tom. "It's all-right. You're safe," he lied. Nobody was ever safe. He of all people should know, but he was unwilling to shatter that precious illusion for Molly's ex, who had just been unlucky and stupid.

"No, it's not all right," Molly protested, voice sharp. "Why did that man die?"

Of all the things Molly would not let go, it had to be this one. Sherlock grimaced but kept his eyes on his unwelcome guest. However, she didn't seem to mind the demand, her demeanour remaining perfectly collected, as she stalked to sit on the couch. "Oh, it's a mystery," she replied. "London has quite a few of those. But you need not worry. Whatever killed him died with him. Everybody who came in contact with the body is fine." She smiled wolfishly, flashing teeth.

Sherlock decided to step in, before things could escalate. He had had to stay under the Russians' radar, while hunting down Moriarty's network and though he knew he could handle them, he would rather not expose Molly and Tom to them longer than necessary.

He hopped to Molly, lightly grasping her shoulder and pushing her towards the door. "Molly, take Tom home."

"What about...?" Molly pressed.

Sherlock shook his head, pleading with her with his eyes, willing her to understand. "Go and don't mention this to anyone. Ever." He shot Tom a warning glare. The other man nodded and cast one last, apprehensive gaze towards the Russian agent.

"Sometimes you strike gold with double agents," she said, once the door closed in their cue. "Sometimes you just strike out."

"Why did you break in at that precise moment?" he asked. "You could have recuperated the earbud at any other time."

She stood, removed her coat with brisk, meticulous moves and draped it over the back of the couch. "I have a case for you, Mr. Holmes."

"If there is a biological weapon loose in London, why not go to the Security Service?"

She fished the remote control from the couch cushions. "Do you mind?" he asked, gesturing with it towards the telly.

He nodded wordlessly. She switched the telly on and flipped though channels until she found a story on the situation in the Ukraine.

Sherlock walked back to his armchair. "A little dramatic, but I see your point. Still what makes you think I'll take the case?"

She switched off the telly, a flash of intent glinting in her eyes. "You recognized me, when I walked in here, which means one of two things: you are either having hear-to-hearts with Mary Watson about the people she killed or someone at the Met is unable to let go of the case, no matter how much time has passed. My best bet would be the then Constable Sally Donovan. She visited me repeatedly in the hospital and gave me her private phone number, insisting that I could call her for anything any-time, day or night. I can look her up and give her something we all want, whether we know it or not: redemption. I'll spin a lovely fairytale about a new family and happiness in my homeland, on the shores of the Lake Baikal. I can get her to stop digging."

The offer was tempting, but there was something else, something just beneath the surface that was niggling at him. "You came in deliberately, to test whether I knew or not."

She smiled again, this time genuinely. "You read clues, Mr. Holmes, I read people."

"You know a lot about me," he observed.

"You're Mycroft Holmes' brother," she explained. "We didn't kill that man in the tunnel, Mr. Holmes."

"But he was your informant."

She nodded. "The trouble with running an operation in foreign territory is that everything is foreign. I don't know London's underbelly or its pitfalls and I'm uncertain of which markers to follow."

"This is what you need me for."

She gestured with one hand in confirmation.

Sherlock leaned back in his chair. "I'll take the case."

# # #

Sherlock gathered the file on the murder of the Campbell family from the kitchen table and took it with him in the living-room. Flames danced in the fireplace. One by one he threw the papers into it and watched them burn.

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

The flat was quiet and smelled of dust and mould with a wisp of cooling tea and Davidoff Echo Woman. Sherlock studied her again and again with ever increasing care, intent on deducing any hint of the person past the façade, past the cover. He had been deceived by a façade before, though he still wasn't certain if what he had read of Mary besides liar was part of the façade or seeds of her personality that had always been there but only the last five years had given her the opportunity to explore. An echo of an echo. Another case of the disguise being a self-portrait. Maybe she had always loved cats, but there weren't many chances for an assassin to have pets. Maybe she had always wanted to bake her own bread, but it had been too impractical to do so before. Maybe she had always leaned towards being a liberal democrat, but she had never voted before.

However, there was nothing past the disguise that he could deduce of Thomas Campbell's widow. Everything she wore was brand new and bought locally so that no trace of her home life could carry through. Her hands were hidden beneath equally new, generic black leather clothes. Her make-up was standard. There was no sign of a pet or of an inner life or secrets. No lover. No indication that she cooked, had hobbies or of what clothes she preferred, when she didn't dress for a mission. He had gleaned much more information from the tiny, formal picture of her that he had found in the case file Sergeant Donovan had brought him. There was no echo, no hint of a self-portrait in her disguise, as though there was nobody alive beneath the painstakingly constructed façade. The woman in front of him could not be bought, threatened or intimidated, not even by the terrible tragedy in her past. After all, she had just coolly negotiated her dissuading from further investigation an honest copper who only wanted justice for her murdered family. It should have unnerved him, instead all he wished for was to know how she was doing it.

She bore his scrutiny well, her patience never faltering, a speck of a Mona Lisa smile on her lips, as she stared right back at him. Mary was on the run so he had estimated that even with Magnussen gone, there had been a risk that someone someday might come after her. The sticking point with the former Mrs. Campbell was that she was just the first of many. One of the world's largest and deadliest secret services knew Mary's secret. There was no guarantee that they would not use it for their own purposes... or that they had not done so already.

"You gave Magnussen the information on Mary Watson."

"Not directly, but I did write the report that lead to it. You have to understand something, Mr. Holmes: it wasn't personal. It's never personal with me, just business. The British intelligence services were using Magnussen's empire of secrets for operations that came into conflict with our interests. I suggested we gave him the means to achieve a life-long goal, inadvisable as it was, and hence become such a liability that your brother would get rid of him for us."

"Or maybe Mary Watson would kill him first." His gaze turned to steel, as he glared at her. "Or maybe I would," he said coldly.

"Either way, we would have gotten what we wanted. Like I said: nothing personal. And if it's any consolation, I didn't expect you to shoot him with your best friend's illegally owned weapon in front of as many witnesses as possible. I thought that you would at least break in and suffocate him in his sleep. Quietly!"

"Either way, you would have gotten what you wanted," he commented bitterly.

She grinned. "Exactly," she confirmed unapologetically. "A while ago, I would not say how long, we raided a suspected terrorist compound in Dagestan, where we found evidence of a bio-weaponry lab, but no trace of a virus or bacteria. Everyone in a nearby village was found dead the next day and by everyone, I mean people and animals too. There had to have been a leak and the bacteria got into the groundwater and from there into the village well. It doesn't survive long after the host's death, which our experts estimate to occur within thirty-eight hours, but we managed to identify it from the residue it leaves in the blood. It's completely new and very deadly. There is no cure. Fortunately, it's not airborne, hence why direct contact with the cadavers poses no contagion risk, however, if dumped into the water supply of a major city, the death toll would be in the range of millions."

"And you tracked it to London."

"No, I tracked it to Lord Moran, former peer of the realm, former Minister for Overseas Development, North Korean spy since 1996 and helping various terrorist groups move sensitive cargoes all over Western Europe and the British isles since the early 2000s, and the man you were instrumental in arresting for attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament. What some people wouldn't do to keep themselves from being bored!"

He ignored the barb. The puzzle pieces clicked together in his mind. "This is why you came to me. You want me to find out with whom Moran was working before he was arrested."

She nodded. "As for the bacteria, you needn't worry. My orders are to find all samples and destroy them. This is far too dangerous for anyone to have."

He leaned back in his armchair, crossing his legs himself and lifting an eyebrow. He reached and snatched a biscuit from the tray Mrs. Hudson had brought for Molly and Tom, but he didn't bite into it merely toying with it between the fingers of his right hand.

"There is a short-cut, of course."

She arched an eye-brow as well. It was like looking into a mirror. An expressionless one. "Is there?"

"Yes, I could go to Mycroft with a pretext to talk to Moran unsupervised and find out what he knows directly, which is the real reason why you came to me in the first place. You don't need my knowledge of London or for me to follow specific markers around the city. You need, as always, my connection to the British government incarnate."

She tilted her head to the side, her smile returning with a vengeance, but before she would speak again, John's loud, trudging steps could be heard coming up the stairs. "Sherlock?" called out the doctor.

His new client leaned towards him, grabbing her coat from the back of the couch. "Your bedroom has a window, correct?" she whispered furtively. "Your hands are shaking," she added in a neutral voice, when he nodded, and disappeared into his bedroom.

Sherlock looked down at his hands folded in his lap: every muscle in them was twitching. He squeezed his fingers into firsts, nails digging into his palm. John could not see.

# # #

_Earlier that evening... _

John looked over the dirty dishes and remnants of their dinner all the way to his pregnant wife across the table from him. "That was amazing... as always," he said, wiping his mouth, and then paused glancing sideways. He could feel Mary's eyes on him and he resisted the irrational urge to squirm. "I was thinking of going to see Sherlock tonight."

"Oh," Mary murmured, the sound innocuous enough. "Give him my love then... . Wait, I'll pack up some of the left-over bread-pudding for him."

He nodded wordlessly. "Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks." He got up and rounded the table to rest his hands on her shoulders and press a light kiss on the top of her head, his moves premeditated yet still awkward. The spontaneity of gestures of casual affection between them had been hard to come by, ever since he had taken her back. Still he worried, his eyes half-consciously seeking her out to assure himself that she was fine. That his daughter was fine. Above all, he searched for Mary Watson, nee Morstan, in this woman he had never truly known.

# # #

"Sherlock, you up there?" John said before coming in.

Sherlock tossed the biscuit in his hand back onto the plate. John had brought along something that made his stomach cramp. He didn't know whether it was from hunger or nausea. He slowly lowered his hands past the arms of his chair, letting his expression morph into one of thoughtfulness.

"Mary sent over some bread-pudding that I'm going to put in the kitchen... unless you wanna have some right now," John went on, his steps echoing in the flat as he went about what he said he would.

"I'm working," Sherlock mumbled dully.

"Moriarty?" John asked with faint alarm in his voice.

"No, but it's something equally dangerous."

Sherlock lifted his head to look at John, who still had trouble loosing the pounds domesticity had added to his figure. He was also not sleeping properly, as dark shadows rimmed his eyes, and taking a detour through pubs on his way home from work more often than not. He was avoiding people as well, because Sherlock saw none of the usual indicators that he was spending any time with Mike Stamford or any other of his friends. There had been no new entries on his blog, either, completing the stories of the cases he had not had a chance to write up already. All signs that he and Mary had problems slotting their lives back together in the aftermath of the revelations about her past.

"Is it for the Met then?" John chanced again, startling Sherlock out of his thoughts.

"Hm?" Sherlock shifted in his seat. "No, it's for a client."

"I see." John stepped closer. "Which client?"

Sherlock thought about it. It was a calculated risk to bring John into this, but Alima Campbell could read him too well, all of her arrows hitting too close for comfort. He needed to be unpredictable to stay head of her and maybe force her go on the defence in the process. Besides, as long as his intellect was failing him, he needed John's feedback more than ever. He needed John to keep him right.

"The Russian security service," Sherlock told his friend.

Even after everything, the pronouncement still made John's eyes bug out of his head. "The Russian...?" John shouted, making Sherlock shush him. "Sherlock! Do you want to go to prison?"

Sherlock waved him off and hopped to his feet. He grabbed his Belstaff and draped himself in it, enjoying the fading scent of wool and the more pungent one of smog wafting off his trusty coat. "Oh, relax! We're not going to spy on the British government also known as my brother for them, but we are going to help them seek and destroy a biological weapon manufactured on their territory and loose in London."

"We?" John asked incredulously, as Sherlock marched past him to the door, fully expecting him to follow.

Sherlock poked his head in from the hallway. "International espionage, a highly infectious bacteria somewhere in this very city, a mysterious terrorist cell. And we'll have to do this without alerting the British security service. I can think of once or twice before when the odds against us were higher, but not more." He pulled the right corner of his mouth in a smile. "Coming?"

John ran after him. "Where are we going?"

"To a crime scene, where else?"

# # #

Alima stood perfectly still, sheltered by the shadows of the night descending upon Baker Street and watched Sherlock Holmes come out of the brownstone with his blogger. The detective hailed one of London's famous black cabs and when the car stopped, he pulled the passenger's door open for his friend to climb inside. She scowled to herself.

TBC


End file.
